My favorite assignments in grade school were the logic puzzles that teachers would hand out when the class had downtime. They offered a few pieces of information — Zoe’s house is blue; Mark lives next to a green house; Jason doesn’t live next to Mark or Zoe — and challenged us to deduce the full picture.

To my third-grade brain, it seemed like a magic trick. By putting a few X’s and O’s on a grid, and by thinking about it hard enough, I could reveal entire worlds. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.

Today, I’m what you might call a “puzzle guy.” I play any puzzle video game I can get my hands on. I edit The Times’s weekly news quiz. And I’m a crossword obsessive. When my colleague Melissa Kirsch attended the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament for this newsletter, I tagged along and competed, trying to keep pace with the world’s best. (I couldn’t.)

Word games make up most of my puzzle diet these days. But I was excited when The Times recently introduced a new game of deduction, Pips, that does away with letters in favor of numbers.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll show you how to play.

Tips for Pips

The goal of Pips is simple: Place the domino pieces you’re given into a bunch of open squares. Certain conditions tell you which pieces can go where.